Beginner Tutorials: How to build a game in Elm — Part 1

Part 1 of 12 — The Game Loop

Next: Part 2 — Add Keyboard

This is the first of 12 parts tutorial about making a game in Elm. Pure Functional Programming are a good fit for video games development, as expressed at the QuakeCon Convention by John Carmack.

Couple of disclaimers:

1. I’m not a game developer, this was just an exercise that I wanted to do with my children to expose them to video games from a different perspective
2. The code is not optimised for performance but it still pretty fast

This is what we are going to make in this part 1 of the tutorial

Let’s get started!

The game loop

Differently from a regular web application that sleep for most of the time and wake up only in case of some event, like an user click for example, a game is always awake.

This is done through a never ending loop, something like (in pseudo-code):

while game is running
    process inputs
    update game world
    generate outputs
loop